Bethel Primitive Baptist Church

The church stands near McMahan, a place once known as Wild Cat and as Whizzerville, after a store and saloon and a rival saloon across Tinney Creek. The land was part of Ambrose Tinney's 1832 grant. When a post office came in 1898, postal officials rejected Whizzerville as too long, and residents chose McMahan, for Edward J. McMahan, who had built a store in 1890. The Southwest Texas Sacred Harp Singing Convention was organized at the Round Top school here on April 28, 1900, and was still meeting each spring in the 1990s.

What the plaque says

Bethel Primitive Baptist Church This congregation was organized June 19, 1852, in the home of John Fleming near this site. Elders George Daniels and Reuben W. Ellis from the Plum Creek Primitive Baptist Church were called to serve as pastors by the charter members: James Jeffrey, Mary Ann Jeffrey, John M. fleming, Abigail fleming, Richard Cole, Sarah Cole, John B. Jeffrey, Elinder Jeffrey, robert McFeron, and Sarah McFeron. A church building was erected at this site in 1901. Bethel Primitive Baptist Church continues to minister to McMahan and the surrounding area s it has since 1852. Texas Sesquicentennial 1836 - 1986

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Lockhart Courthouse Square — 8.7 mi
  A cotton-era courthouse town named the Barbecue Capital of Texas, built near the 1840 Plum Creek fight that followed the killing of Comanche leaders at peace talks.
• Bastrop State Park — 23 mi
  The westernmost loblolly pines in the United States, cut off from the East Texas forest by a hundred miles of post oak, burned almost entirely in 2011 and growing back.
• Spring Lake and the Meadows Center — 24 mi
  The headsprings of the San Marcos River, among the longest-inhabited places in North America, once an amusement park with a swimming pig and now seen from glass-bottom boats.
• McKinney Falls State Park — 25 mi
  Limestone falls on Onion Creek inside Austin, where people camped under a rock overhang for thousands of years and a financier of the Texas Revolution built his stone ranch house.

More markers nearby

• Delhi — 8.4 mi
• Dr. D. Port Smythe — 8.4 mi
• Battle of Plum Creek — 8.5 mi
• Caldwell County — 8.7 mi